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unknown visitor	Re: American Thinker Articles-Why Obama's Communist Connections Are Not Headlines 10/10/2008 8:19:25 AM
	Why Obama's Communist Connections Are Not Headlines October 10, 2008 By Paul Kengor There's a lot of frustration among conservatives over how Barack Obama's radical past seems to be making no impact whatsoever among the American public. His connection to communists in particular, from communist-terrorists like Bill Ayers to the communist agitator-journalist Frank Marshall Davis to fellow travelers like Saul Alinsky, has simply failed to resonate beyond the political right. Quite the contrary, the more information that becomes available on Obama's radical associations, the more he seems to widen his lead over John McCain, a man who was tortured by communists in Vietnam. I understand these frustrations completely. I'm also not surprised. I have seen for quite some time that although we won the Cold War -- and defeated the Soviet communist empire -- America is vulnerable to varying degrees of collectivism, wealth redistribution, "creeping socialism" (Ronald Reagan's phrase), class-warfare rhetoric, and generally milder, more palatable (but still dangerous) forms of disguised Marxism. Why? How? The answer is simple: The history and truth about communism is not taught by our educators. That total failure to remind and understand means that Americans are painfully vulnerable to repeat mistakes that should have been forever tossed onto the ash-heap of history. Communism and the Cold War has been my area of research for years. I've written books on the subject. I lecture on the subject at Grove City College and around the country. The book I'm currently researching with Peter Schweizer is a Cold War book, which, ironically, inevitably brought us into contact with Marxist characters who allied with and even mentored Barack Obama. Of all the lectures that I do around the country, none seem to rivet the audience as much as my discourse on the horrors of communism. In these lectures, which are usually connected to my books on Ronald Reagan, I do a 10-15 minute backgrounder on the crimes of communists-from their militant attacks on private property, on members of all religious faiths, and on basic civil liberties, to their total death toll of over 100 million bloodied, emaciated corpses in the 20^th century. As I do these presentations, the young people, especially on college campuses, are locked in, amazed at what they are hearing. I think they are especially struck that I always ground every fact and figure in reliable research and authorities -- books published by Harvard University Press and Yale University Press, quotes from the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev and Vaclav Havel and Alexander Yakovlev, anti-Soviet appraisals from certain Cold War Democrats like Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy and even early liberals like Woodrow Wilson. I rarely use right-wing sources because I don't want the professors of these students to be able to later shoot a single hole in my presentation -- a potential tactic to undermine the overall thesis. And speaking of those professors, that gets to my point here: As the young people in my audience are fully engaged, hands in the air with question after question -- obviously hearing all of these things for the first time in their lives, from K-12 to college, as they are eager to inform me after my talk -- the professors often stare at me with contempt. In one case, a British professor, who could not step sighing, squirming, and rolling her eyes as I quoted the most heinous assessments of religion by Marx and Lenin, got up and stormed out of the room. These professors glare at me as if the ghost of Joe McCarthy has flown into the room and leapt inside of my body. In fact, that's the essence of their criticism: It is not so much that these professors approve of communism as much as they disapprove of -- actually, utterly despise -- anti-communism. They are anti-anti-communist more so than pro-communist. Conservatives need to understand this, so as to avoid broad-brushing and losing credibility. Sure, a lot of professors are Marxists, and many more share the utopian goals of Marxism, but the vast majority are simply leftists. Being on the left entails many strange contradictions and political pathologies, one of which is this bizarre revulsion toward anti-communists. These leftists -- to their credit -- despise fascism, and will preach anti-fascism until their blue in the face. They are as appalled by fascism as conservatives are by communism. But while conservatives detest both communism and fascism, liberals only detest one of the two. For instance, I recently saw that Human Events created a list of the top 10 worst books ever written, which included, as the top two, Marx's Communist Manifesto (#1), followed by Hitler's Mein Kampf (#2). That ranking is easily defended solely on numbers: Hitler killed at least 10 million; communism killed at least 100 million. Either way, kudos to Human Events, a conservative newspaper, for putting both communism and fascism in its top two. Yet, conversely, any liberal version of such a list would not even place the Communist Manifesto in the top 10. I guarantee that liberals who read the Human Events list will snicker at its alleged Neanderthal anti-communism. The leftist intelligentsia that dominates higher education, and which writes the civics texts used in high schools -- I've read and studied these texts -- and which trains the teachers who teach in high schools, is not in the slightest bit notably anti-communist. These liberals do not teach the lessons of communism. What's more, aside from failing to instruct their students in the crass facts about communism's unprecedented destruction -- its purges, mass famines, show trials, killing fields, concentration camps -- these educators are negligent in failing to teach the essential, non-emotional, but crucial Econ 101 basics that contrast capitalism and communism and, thus, that get at the heart of how and why command economies simply do not work. Each semester in my Comparative Politics course at Grove City College, it takes no more than 50 minutes to matter-of-factly lay out the rudimentary differences. Whereas capitalist systems are based on the market forces of supply and demand, which dictate prices and production levels and targets, communist systems are based on central planning, by which a government bureau attempts to manage such things. Capitalism is based on private ownership; communism on public ownership. Capitalism thrives on small government and taxes; communism on large government and taxes, typically progressive income-tax rates and estate taxes -- both advocated explicitly by Marx -- and much more. This stuff isn't rocket science. It is easy to teach, if the professor desires. The problem is that it isn't being taught. Consequently, Americans today do not know why communism is such a devastating ideology, at both the level of plain economic theory and in actual historical practice. It is a remarkably hateful system, based on literal hatred and targeted annihilation of entire classes and groups of people. (Nazism sought genocide based on ethnicity; communism sought genocide based on class.) Most Americans generally know that the USSR was a bad place and that it was good that the Berlin Wall fell; they lived through that. But they know little beyond that, especially young Americans in college today, born around the time the wall fell -- Obama's biggest supporters. Nowhere in America is Barack Obama worshipped as he is on college campuses, by students and professors alike. What does it all mean for November 2008? It means that millions of modern Americans, when they hear that Barack Obama has deep roots with communist radicals like Bill Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis, don't care; they don't get it. Moreover, the leftist establishment -- from academia to media to Hollywood -- will not help them get it. To the contrary, the left responds to these accusations by not only downplaying or dismissing them but by ridiculing or even vilifying them, given the left's reflexive anti-anti-communism. The left will create bad guys out of the anti-communists who are legitimately blowing the whistle on the real bad guys. When the leftists of the ‘60s took over higher education and the media, they really knew what they were doing. This was brilliant, masterful, a tactical slam-dunk, a tremendous coup for them and their worldview, with ripple effects we can scarcely imagine. Does this mean that the McCain camp, talk radio and conservatives generally shouldn't bother exposing these things? Not at all. The truth is the truth, and needs to be told. Moderates especially need to be informed that Barack Obama is not your typical liberal: he is the most hard-left Democrat that his party has ever nominated for the presidency. It is absolutely not a coincidence that the man with these far-left associations just so happens to be ranked -- quantifiably, objectively, by non-partisan, respected sources like National Journal -- the most far-left member of the U.S. Senate, which is no small thing given the leftward drift of the modern Democratic Party. In other words, Obama's extremist associations matter; they are fully revealing, illustrative of the political-ideological realities that the pro-Obama media will not expose. His voting record bears this out. That said, I warn my fellow conservatives: Be prepared to be really, really frustrated when few people seem to care. The Santayana aphorism is correct: those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. For decades now, we haven't taught the next generation what it needs to know from its immediate past. And now, to borrow from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, America's chickens have come home to roost. Paul Kengor is author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperPerennial, 2007) and professor of political science at Grove City College. His latest book is The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan's Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007). 24 Comments on "Why Obama's Communist Connections Are Not Headlines"

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unknown visitor	American Thinker Articles-What is it about Democratic presidential candidates and terrorists? 10/10/2008 8:24:48 AM
	October 10, 2008 What is it about Democratic presidential candidates and terrorists? By Harold Kildow What is it about Democratic presidential candidates and terrorists? Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were each famously supportive of ur-terrorist Yassar Arafat. Carter, whose administration never had a discouraging word for Arafat, to this day is carrying water for Hamas, and the most frequent foreign visitor to the Clinton Whitehouse was Arafat. Hillary showed her undying adoration with her famous embrace of Suha Arafat, currently living in Paris off the stolen billions of Palestinian aid money her turbaned hubby weaseled away from US taxpayers and gullible trans-national organizations. And what about those pardons for FALN terrorists? What was that about? (Here is a complete list of Clinton's pardons-drug dealers, bank robbers, terrorists, counterfeiters, money launderers, bank fraud specialists...all upstanding citizens no doubt, caught up somehow in over-zealous prosecutions.) Al Gore, while never publicly endorsed Ted "The Unabomber" Kaczynski, the almost identical texts of the Unabomber's "Manifesto" and Gore's book "Earth in the Balance" are startling. (Go here to take the fun challenge of detecting which quote is from which document). And while the no one on the left had anything to say about the domestic eco-terrorists the FBI recently crushed, Bill Clinton openly bragged after the 1996 elections that the Oklahoma City Bombing and the liberal media chorus cinched his re-election: Clinton openly boasted to reporters after his 1996 re-election that the liberal media scenario for the Oklahoma City bombing (that it was all the work of angry white "right-wingers" goaded by talk radio) turned the tide for him. In fact, I remember liberal media people I talked to at the time who were rubbing their hands with glee at that perceived political angle in all this. And now of course, thanks to Stanley Kurtz, we find revealed the intimate connection -- whatever denials the Obama campaign attempts -- of Barack Obama and William Ayers, founder of the late 1960's Weather Underground group, responsible for hundreds of bombings, multiple attempted murders, and two accomplished murders to their "credit". All defiantly owned and unapologized for, by the way. Recall that several of Obama's campaign offices proudly displayed that way cool poster of Che Guevara, Casto's trigger man. So, what's the deal with Democratic Presidents and hopefuls connecting so soulfully with terrorists? It appears the Saul Alinsky hard left has had a gun to the ribs of the more moderate wing of the party for some time, and over time, especially with the advent of the nutroots blogosphere and the ascendancy of the Nancy and Harry Show on Capital Hill, radicals fueled with Soros money have become more and more influential as they have been mainstreamed by the boys and girls of the press. As Bob Dylan wrote, you don't need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing (from the song that inspired the name that romantic band of crazy kids took for themselves). And as John Locke before him put it, in language picked up by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration, when a long Train of Actings show the Councils all tending one way, how can a man any more hinder himself from being persuaded in his own mind which way things are going...? So, the prevailing winds have been leftward, despite the freshet that was the Reagan Revolution. The revelation of this season's Democratic candidate's relation to the hard left has had the effect of a termite inspector's flashlight aimed at the dark underground places no one has been paying attention to these past decades. Turns out all our institutions are infested with hard left radicals, and they have been busily destroying the foundations of our society from within. Maybe they have made their big move too soon, and the American public will recoil at the idea of radical leftists moving into the open in a presidential administration; in which case under the cover of darkness they will continue their slow but steady work of undermining the foundations. If not, and they manage to get their candidate into the most visible office in the land, get ready for a wicked left turn, as the radicals pour out of the basement and into the rest of the building. *Harold Kildow is co-proprietor of the website Powers and Principalities.* 2 Comments on "What is it about Democratic presidential candidates and terrorists?"

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unknown visitor	American Thinker Articles - All That Darned Conservatism 10/10/2008 8:32:16 AM
	October 10, 2008 All That Darned Conservatism By Randall Hoven Did you realize that we conservatives got all we wanted and that's what screwed up just about everything, from hurricanes and Iraq to the global financial meltdown? That's a rapidly-developing propaganda theme being disseminated in the Big Media. Case in point: Thomas Frank (What's the Matter with Kansas?) in the Wall Street Journal. "Over many years of ascendancy, conservative Republicans have filled government agencies with conservative Republicans and proceeded to enact the conservative Republican policy wish list -- tax cuts, deregulation, privatization, outsourcing federal work, and so on. "And as a consequence of these policies our conservative Republican government has bungled most of the big tasks that have fallen to it. The rescue and recovery of the Gulf Coast was a disaster. The reconstruction of Iraq was a disaster. The regulatory agencies became so dumb they didn't even see the disasters they were set up to prevent. And each disaster was attributable to the conservative philosophy of government." If Mr. Frank really believes this, then one of us is crazy. But I don't think he believes it. I think he's in the tank for Barack Obama and wants to use the megaphone of the WSJ to put some meat on Obama's bones of "the last eight years." You can read his whole article, and you'll find no shred of evidence to support any of his claims. His logic is simple -- and flawed. It goes like this. Republicans are conservative. (Flawed premise number one.) Republicans have ruled in recent years. (Flawed premise number two.) Everything wrong in that time is therefore due to conservatism. (The good old post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, even if based on good premises.) Republicans are conservative We conservatives wish Republicans governed with any conservatism. There were some tax rate cuts in 2001, but that's about the sum total of the conservative "wish list" that was enacted under George W. Bush. And how about those tax cuts? In 2006, the federal government took in more money, after adjusting for inflation, than it ever had in its history. While it was "only" 18.4% of GDP, that still beat the 1960-2000 average of 18.2%. And those making over $200,000 per year, or the top 2%, paid 47% of all personal income tax . As a conservative, I can tell you that historic levels of federal revenue were not on my wish list. Nor was a tax code so progressive that 2% of filers pay almost half of all income taxes. Could Mr. Frank, as a non-conservative (one could presume), please tell us how much the federal government should take in? Is the most in history not enough? And that's as good as it gets, conservative agenda-wise. I see Mr. Frank did not bother even listing "spending cuts" in his so-called conservative wish list. I'm a conservative who reads lots of conservative stuff, and I don't recall seeing much in the way of calls for "outsourcing federal work." But every conservative I know wants the government to cut spending. And every conservative I know is pretty irritated that the exact opposite happened under George Bush. As for deregulation and privatization, what is Mr. Frank talking about? I'm sure that somewhere in the byzantine world of government, some regulation was changed or something might have been privatized. But the general trend has been the exact opposite. In 1999 the federal register published 73,880 pages of regulations. In 2004 it was 78,851, or almost 5,000 more pages of regulations. And whatever was privatized, our government still managed to spend 20.3% of GDP in 2006 versus 18.4% in 2000. If we privatized anything, it was overwhelmed by un-privatizing a net 1.9% of our economy (about a quarter of a trillion dollars). To be blunt, we conservatives did not get a damn thing on our real wish list. Instead we got more government spending, prescription coverage under Medicare, No Child Left Behind, Campaign Finance Reform, increased minimum wage, etc., etc. And we conservatives believe that is the problem! Republicans Have Ruled? George W. Bush has been President since January 20, 2001, or almost the last eight years; that is true. But the President can only sign the budgets Congress gives him, and he can only fill high-level positions with people approved by the Senate. On June 6, 2001, Jim Jeffords jumped from the Republican party and the Senate jumped to Democratic control with him, for almost two years. And both houses of Congress have been in Democratic hands the last two years. For those four years in between, the Democrats had enough Senators to filibuster anything, and they used that power freely. But with Republicans like Chafee (now endorsing Obama), Collins, Snowe and Specter, the filibuster was not always necessary. The US Senate has been the final resting place of virtually every "conservative" initiative in the last eight years, yet the birthplace of such non-conservative monsters as Campaign Finance Reform and Comprehensive Immigration Reform. By the way, at the end of 2006, just before the Democrats took over Congress again, the unemployment rate stood at 4.4% and real GDP had averaged 3% annual growth in the previous four years. Did you get the change you wanted? Everything Wrong Is Due to Conservatism In what way was the "rescue and recovery of the Gulf Coast" a "disaster"? Our military and Coast Guard pulled thousands of people out of harm's way. Virtually all fatalities were due to the initial hurricane and immediate flooding, having nothing whatever to do with a federal government response, and just about everything to do with a Cat-4 hurricane hitting a major population center built below sea level. What we saw on TV was a mess at the Superdome, a place where people who had been told to leave the city were told not to go. Just as the Katrina mess should be blamed on a hurricane and not on "conservative policies", Iraq reconstruction problems should be blamed on 20 years of rule by the psychotic Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi infrastructure, other than Saddam's palaces, had been neglected ever since Saddam assassinated his way to power 20 years before. The security situation was a little dicey because Saddam's "police", rather than serving and protecting, raped, killed and tortured Iraqi citizens. There was a rape room in almost every police station, with the busiest one in the Baghdad Central Police Academy. Such thugs do not go gently. How can Mr. Franks so glibly, with no evidence whatever brought to bear, blame the Iraqi reconstruction difficulties on conservative policies? What "conservative" policies? The one of using only 150,000 troops? The one of insisting on Iraqis running Iraq, under a constitution and fair elections? The one of spending billions of our own dollars in Iraq? Would a 5-year occupation under a US viceroy and 500,000 troops have been the "liberal" policy? Would he have preferred Harry Truman's "liberal" solution used on Japan in 1945 - two atomic bombs? Again, what is Mr. Franks talking about? Deregulation and the Financial Mess When it comes to blaming the current financial mess on "deregulation", Mr. Franks is not alone. Barack Obama did just that in the most recent debate. How did we manage to deregulate the world, from Germany and Britain to Belgium and Iceland? Are you telling me that a minor change to Glass-Steagall signed into law by President Clinton in 1999 ultimately caused Iceland to go bankrupt in 2008? The very liberal Village Voice places the blame of the housing mess very squarely on the shoulders of Andrew Cuomo, President Clinton's Secretary of HUD. Hint: he did not "deregulate." And when it came to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failing, which started the whole snowball, it was Republicans who were clamoring for stricter regulation and oversight, and Democrats fighting them tooth and claw. Here was Barney Frank in 2003: "These two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing." You can also see on YouTube how those Democrats treated the regulators. Thomas Frank said in the WSJ, "The regulatory agencies became so dumb they didn't even see the disasters." I think he mixed up the regulators, who did see disasters coming, with Barney Frank, the Congressional Black Caucus and other defenders of Fannie Mae. Conversely, John McCain co-sponsored (with three other Republicans) the Federal Housing Enterprise Act of 2005, a bill "to address the regulation of secondary mortgage market enterprises" and which passed committee. McCain then made an impassioned plea on the floor of the Senate to pass the Act , beginning this way: Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae's regulator reported that the company's quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were "illusions deliberately and systematically created" by the company's senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal. The bill was killed on the Senate floor. Three of Fannie Mae's top executives were sued by the government for misstating earnings. According to the Washington Post: The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight sued the former executives in 2006, seeking to recoup more than $115 million of compensation the agency said they received while Fannie Mae's earnings were misstated, plus penalties that could have exceeded $100 million. [Franklin] Raines, former chief financial officer J. Timothy Howard and former controller Leanne G. Spencer were fighting the charges. ... OFHEO Director James B. Lockhart III said the former executives "improperly manipulated earnings to maximize their bonuses . . . misleading the regulator and the public." Also according to the Washington Post , the executives settled the suit. Raines had agreed to forgo stock, cash and other benefits worth $24.7 million in exchange for dismissing the charges against him... Former chief financial officer J. Timothy Howard agreed to a settlement OFHEO valued at $6.4 million -- $5.2 million in stock options -- and former controller Leanne G. Spencer agreed to pay $275,000. I'm not seeing a lot of "conservative policies" in action here. In fact, Barack Obama apparently still gets housing advice from Franklin Raines. Can you imagine if John McCain took advice from a former Enron executive? At least the government didn't bail out Enron, nor did Enron's failure lead to the bankruptcy of Iceland. Back to Basics The Federal Reserve Act was enacted in 1913 to manage monetary policy. Seventeen years later a recession was turned into the Great Depression, largely due to mismanaged monetary policy. Despite the lousy monetary policy, Hoover's tax increases and Smoot-Hawley protectionism, all anything but free market solutions, Democrats were successful in blaming the Depression on the free market. Now, some 75 years later, government at all levels in the US takes up almost 40% of our economy. Federal regulations took up 2,620 pages in 1936, the middle of the New Deal. In 2004 those regulations took up 78,851 pages. Government has become ever larger and more intrusive and the free market has been smothered almost to death, with no let-up in the last eight years. How can you blame the "free market" when it doesn't even exist? What does exist is a government that only Kafka could understand and only Marx could love. (For the conspiracy minded, get a load of a 1922 New York Times article.) And how do Thomas Frank, Barack Obama and the rest of the Democrats plan to fix it? More government, of course. Randall Hoven can be contacted at randall.hoven@gmail.com or via his web site, kulak.worldbreak.com. 4 Comments on "All That Darned Conservatism"

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